The Wonderful Humanity of God
We’ve recently launched a new series called Jesus 1.0, and, I don’t know about you, but my heart is longing for some refreshment and reorientation in the person and presence of Jesus. As Pastor Danny has mentioned, we’re using a harmony of the gospels to bring a sense of unified voices (four voices to be clear, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) to illuminate the powerful life of Jesus.
And I find myself longing, not just for more scripture (though of course that is needed!) but for the clarity and purpose that the life of Jesus provides us. We can so often rush to the Cross of Christ that we miss the brilliance and intentionality of his daily life with ordinary people like us.
Jesus, the Son of God, walked our world as a human.
It’s so wonderful to remember that this Jesus isn’t just a nice philosophy, fantasy story, or fancy metaphor. No, God’s involvement with humanity, especially as He put on human flesh and walked in the power of the Holy Spirit, as a human in real-time. He grew tired. He faced disease. He witnessed corruption. He peered into the motives of the disciples, friends, and enemies around Him, not just because He is God, but because He is human too.
He understands our inner life. What it’s like to have thoughts, temptations, concerns, and desires. Because of the humanity of Jesus, we can let down our defenses about how we “should” be before God, knowing we’re understood, we can just be with God.
God had already said in the Old Testament that He is intimately acquainted with our ways (Psalm 139) and knows our frame, that we are but dust (Psalm 103), but in Jesus we understand in our experience that God really does know us. And not only does He see all our deformities, disabilities, struggles, and sins–but He does something about it. He enteres the broken world. He doesn’t leave us alone. He comes into the broken mess, not just to observe, but to transform.
Even as He left earth, Jesus was so sensitive to our fragile, finite needs that He said He would send His Holy Spirit into each of our lives who place our faith in Him. Promising, in a way, that His divinity would in-fill us just as He incarnated the human form. That His own breath and life would come to in-fill our frame, our lives, our dust. Oh, what a wonderful gift our Father God would give us, to move from His spoken revelation of knowing us into the deep, New Testament experience of His Spirit indwelling us, allowing us to begin to feel known.
Jesus walked as the human prototype, revealing our broken human ways.
Not only was His whole earthly life a beautiful revelation of God-knowing-us, but Jesus’s literal living was a revelation of what human life was meant to be! But wait, wasn’t Jesus God…so didn’t He have all these secret special qualifications that are off-limits to humans? Wasn’t He some totally different category than our broken, dysfunctional, messy humanity? Well, yes, if you’re meaning He wasn’t wounded by sin and born into our same pathologies and broken relationship with God.
But the crucial difference in Jesus isn’t just His divinity (which was humbly laid aside so He could live as a complete human in submission to His Father, see Philippians 2:5-8), but that He actually lived the human-life as was made to be lived. This makes him strikingly different, not just in His divinity which was laid aside, but in His humanity. His dependence on the Holy Spirit and His submission to His Father was unlike anything the world had seen since Adam and Eve.
Jesus’s humanity was strikingly different from the broken human structures and the wounded, rebellious humanity around Him. And it’s strikingly different from our own life. The Pharisees and the Roman leaders weren’t offended at divinity–they were fine with God in heaven–but not this human man claiming divinity and then displaying and living this full-humanity in love toward others as the Son of God.
Jesus’s whole human life was a revelation of what a human being, in complete dependence on God could be. Human life as it was meant to be lived. The thing that is convicting and heart-breaking about Jesus’s life is not that it was impossible to live because of His super-God-qualities, but because it was impossible for us to live because of our broken relationship with God. All humanity, outside of Jesus, had chosen not to live entwined in that vital relationship with God! And the conviction is that His life is the life we could have had once upon a time. His humanity revealed true humanity and in contrast revealed our darkened and rebellious ways.
Jesus walked as the human prototype, revealing and inaugurating a new way to be human.
And this is also the wonderful work of Jesus, for only this divine-human person, this Son of God, could go to the cross and die in our place. We can place our sins on His shoulders, not just because He is God, but because He is also one of us. And the only One who lived a perfect life.
And the rich blessing we get in studying this Jesus is that His whole life, His thought life, His oration, His personal conversations, His miracles, His exhortations, His prophecies, His lifestyle–all of it is a revelation of how we were made to live! And, in our restored relationship with Jesus, each word, each action, each goal of His can become “incarnated” in us. That is the amazing challenge of John 14:12, ““Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do, because I am going to the Father.” The revelation of His word that we hear on Sundays is an invitation to experience His Spirit working His wonderful ways of living into our ordinary, dailylives.
Ponder for a moment:
Are you beginning to sense what Jesus is inviting you into through these sermons?
What if the life of Jesus was an invitation to you to begin to experience a whole new way to live?
What it look like to follow Jesus this season? How might this impact others around you?